A Note in Favor of Polemical Vignettes

Opposed to the philosophical novel--the bloated doorstop of prose in which two thousand years of patriarchal clichés take on the lyrical weight of a dubious story--is the polemical vignette, which peers into a corner of the universe that the novelist has deemed unworthy or uninteresting and finds there a probative counterexample to one or another grotesque generalization. Like Hamlet to Horatio, it says, here is something, from heaven or on earth, not dreamt of in your philosophy, take account! I have written a few such things, and I want to write more, but I find that they tend to be a bit hard to sell.

In any case, one such piece of writing, "Simple Present," has been accepted for publication in the project Becoming: An Anthology. As a tenacious Hegelian, I had to submit something to a project with that title! The anthology is scheduled to be published in November of this year, and if you who are reading this happen to be the sort of person who thinks and writes and thinks about writing and thinks by way of writing, then you might want to look at it carefully.